Nelson Mandela obituary part three: domestic and political strife

After becoming secretary of the ANC Youth League, Mandela receives his first
banning order, preventing him from attending political gatherings. Taking
the group's struggle underground, he faces difficulty both in politics and
at home

Nelson Mandela in the early 1960'sPhoto: AFP/Getty Images

10:38PM GMT 05 Dec 2013

When Nelson Mandela took the helm of the ANC Youth League in 1947, he used the post to develop contacts throughout the country, laying the foundations of his political future. He was now broadening his concept of African nationalism. In 1948 the Youth League’s manifesto conceded that “the different racial groups had come to stay”, and that Indians in South Africa, no less than the Africans, were an oppressed group, to be welcomed as allies. By the 1950s Mandela had emerged along with Walter Sisulu and Oliver Tambo, another close friend, as a leading non-racial democrat.

The advent to power of the Nationalist Party in 1948 heralded a series of laws which codified racial segregation in every aspect of life and built the system of apartheid. With the Youth League now virtually in control of the ANC, a conference at Bloemfontein in 1949 adopted a programme of defiance. The ANC set out to flout the racist laws and to bring pressure upon the government through a series of strikes.

As disruption spread, and membership of the ANC climbed, the government reacted with increasing severity. In 1952 several people were killed in riots, yet by the end of that year more than 8,000 had deliberately courted imprisonment as a consequence of the Defiance Campaign.

Mandela became a marked man. In 1952 he received his first banning order, which prohibited him from joining any gatherings for six months, and confined him to Johannesburg under the Suppression of Communism Act of 1950. A nine-month prison sentence was suspended because the judge accepted that the ANC was committed to peaceful action.

No sooner had the banning order expired (in June 1953) than Mandela threw himself into the campaign against the government’s plan to move Africans out of the western areas of Johannesburg. Within two months he found himself banned again, this time for two years. Many ANC leaders went abroad during this period, but Mandela remained to continue the struggle underground. To enable the ANC to survive in the face of repression he devised the M (for Mandela) plan, under which the movement was reorganised into a number of small cells.

Anti-apartheid activist and lawyer Nelson Mandela in the office of Mandela and Tambo (Jurgen Schadeberg/Getty Images)

Despite his underground activity, the banning order left Mandela with time on his hands. He passed his attorney’s admission exam and opened a legal office in partnership with Oliver Tambo. When the Transvaal Law Society petitioned the Supreme Court to strike Mandela off the roll because of his involvement with the Defiance Campaign, his liberal white contacts proved their value. He was successfully defended by Walter Pollack, chairman of the Johannesburg Bar.

For Mandela, the early 1950s was a time of domestic as well as political strife. His work had increasingly taken him away from home; and when he was confined to Johannesburg in 1952, Evelyn was in Durban on a midwifery course.

Mandela was almost certainly unfaithful, and scorned discretion. On her return from Durban in 1953, Evelyn found that her well-justified jealousy provoked Mandela either to fury or chilling distance. The birth of a second daughter, named Makaziwe in tribute to her dead sister, in 1954 failed to reconcile the couple. They separated in 1956 and were divorced the next year.

The split caused strains in Mandela’s relations with his children. Thembi, his eldest son, seemed particularly affected, and Mandela’s stern approach to fatherhood did not help. Although Thembi would be associated with his father’s political work, he never visited him in prison.

During the 1950s Mandela met only limited success in his efforts to create a united opposition to white supremacy. The key division was between the Africanists, who wanted the struggle to be waged exclusively by and for black people, and the Communists, who viewed oppression in South Africa in class terms and included whites and Indians. The Freedom Charter of 1955, intended to draw together the anti-apartheid movement, provoked the hard-line Africanists to break away from the ANC and set up the Pan Africanist Congress.

Even so, the government was alarmed. In 1956 Mandela was one of 156 black leaders arrested and charged under the Suppression of Communism Act with trying to incite revolution and create “a people’s democracy” on the Soviet model.

Nelson Mandela on trial in 1958

Although Mandela was soon freed on bail, the ensuing trial, which lasted for five years, absorbed most of his energies at a time when they were urgently needed to keep the ANC together. But his loss of influence within South Africa was balanced by the first signs of international recognition. In 1956 a Treason Trial Defence Fund was set up in Britain. The verdict, when it came in March 1961, triumphantly vindicated the accused. “On the evidence before this court,” it was held, “it is impossible to come to the conclusion that the ANC had acquired or adopted a policy to overthrow the State by violence.”